Photo and Art Archive

Columns

Contact Us

Search

S&L #88 Summer 2006

This issue might come as much of a shocker to you as it did to me. A mere 12 pages, the smallest issue I’ve done since I can remember. I’ve been saying for a long time now, that times were tough and that it was hard to gets ads, etc. And over the past few months that feeling got worse and then it seems like everything just hit a brick wall. I think that everyone is either completely spaced out or traveling cause I didn’t even hear back from half the regular advertisers, and even some of the columnists. It makes me feel like

What communities do infoshops represent? Are we going to be limited to a white, middle class, male-dominated activist/anarchist/punk subculture? Will infoshops serve as a spark of real social change? What are we doing exactly? How do we get better involved in the community issues and not just be a clubhouse?

The planet Saturn takes exactly 29.5 years to return to the same point it was the moment you were born. Astronomically speaking, this is simply the amount of time it takes Saturn to swing around its elliptical orbit before making another valiant go of it. The entire concept can be drawn out in logarithmic tables and charted out to within twelve decimals of exactness. Astrologically speaking, the Saturn Return is a sort of metaphysical puberty, that is, the point at which someone’s been around long enough to be completely called an adult.

Brice and I used to talk about how we were going to go underground for animal liberation. I was reading books about activists who were liberating monkeys and sabotaging factory farms, and Brice was reading Edward Abbey’s book about billboard improvement. We would stay up late, baking everything cookies, hatching our plans. No tell-tale tattoos, no getting caught, no compromise. I pictured the underground as a highly elaborate series of tunnels under the cities, full of action, fire lit walls, and exciting people. I wanted to be there; I

The Mennonites at the mouth of our hollow would truly think they were homesteading at the Gates of Hell, if they knew what goes on a few miles deeper into the hills. Slug and Lettuce readers, on the other hand, will be pleased to know that a bunch of queer punx are whooping it up here at the Ida community in Middle Tennessee.

I read an essay called “Linking Movements, Linking Lives” by Cherry Galette and was amazed by her ability to link issues together as well as by her critique of systemic oppression. In “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind,” the workshops on supporting women and children that Vikki Law and I have been giving this summer, one thing I keep saying is that supporting a woman’s right to have a child is as important as supporting a woman’s right to have an abortion; if one is truly pro-choice, there has to be a choice.

Anarchism, What it Stands For, by Emma Goldman, summarized, modernized, translated into more plain language, and generally butchered by Cindy.

Every new idea that has brought humanity forward has been fought against viciously by people in power. Every new generation faces more insidious forms of social control, but still, the march towards freedom continues on.

Normally I have a relatively clear idea of what I want to write my column about before I sit down to write. This time I don’t. It’s probably a symptom of my life still being in a greater state of flux than normal. In the last seven months, I left and divorced my husband, left my job for a new one and moved from six years of relative isolation in the Colorado mountains to the city of Minneapolis.